The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an intergovernmental international radio telescope project being built in Australia (low-frequency) and South Africa (mid-frequency).

[citation needed] In April 2011, Jodrell Bank Observatory of the University of Manchester, in Cheshire, England was announced as the location for the project headquarters.

[13] In April 2015, the headquarters of the SKA project were chosen to be located at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK,[14][15] officially opened in July 2019.

[16][17] On 12 March 2019, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) was founded in Rome by seven initial member countries: Australia, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

[20] The Australian part of the project comprises 100,000 antennas built across 74 km (46 mi), also in the Murchison region, in the traditional lands of the Wajarri Aboriginal people.

[21] The Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) in India and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) are investigating the possibility of establishing supercomputing facilities to handle data from the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope.

[22] On 3 January 2024, Indian government approved joining the SKA project accompanied by a financial commitment of ₹1,250 crore which marks the initial step towards ratification as a member state.

[27] This will greatly increase the survey speed of the SKA and enable several users to observe different pieces of the sky simultaneously, which is useful for (e.g.) monitoring multiple pulsars.

[21] The headquarters of the SKA are located at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England,[44] while the telescopes will be installed in Australia and South Africa.

It employs advanced, innovative technologies such as phased array feeds to give a wide field of view (30 square degrees).

ASKAP was built by CSIRO at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory site, located near Boolardy in the mid-west region of Western Australia.

[51] MeerKAT is a South African project consisting of an array of sixty-four 13.5-metre diameter dishes as a world class science instrument, and was also built to help develop technology for the SKA.

[52][needs update] The dishes are equipped with a number of high performance single pixel feeds to cover frequencies from 580 MHz up to 14 GHz.

The Allen Telescope Array in California uses innovative 6.1m offset Gregorian dishes equipped with wide band single feeds covering frequencies from 500 MHz to 11 GHz.

An Tao, head of the SKA group of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, stated, "It will generate data streams far beyond the total Internet traffic worldwide."

[78] It is illegal for any US company to export high end Intel FPGAs or any related CSP design details or firmware to China[79] amid the US-embargo[80][81][82][83] which will severely limit cooperation.

[85] Put in place to specifically support the South African SKA bid, it outlaws all activities that could endanger scientific operation of core astronomical instruments.

In 2010, concerns were raised over the will to enforce this law when Royal Dutch Shell applied to explore the Karoo for shale gas using hydraulic fracturing, an activity that would have the potential to increase radio interference at the site.

[88] During 2014, South Africa experienced a month-long strike action by the National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA), which added to the delays of the installation of dishes.

For almost one hundred years, Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity has precisely predicted the outcome of every experiment made to test it.

The goal is to reveal whether Einstein was correct in his description of space, time and gravity, or whether alternatives to general relativity are needed to account for these phenomena.

This period of the Dark Ages, culminating in First Light, is considered the first chapter in the cosmic story of creation, and the resolving power required to see this event is the reason for the Square Kilometre Array's design.

[104] It is still not possible to answer basic questions about the origin and evolution of cosmic magnetic fields, but it is clear that they are an important component of interstellar and intergalactic space.